Automated manufacturing systems are regarded as highly productive, thus improving company competitiveness. Many companies consider automation as either fully automated or entirely manual. Automation is however always a combination of automated and manual tasks. The problem is to choose the most appropriate level of automation at every occasion. Traditional manufacturing strategy theory treats automation as one subset of process technology decision category and thus the whole area has to be further developed. The authors suggest a new approach to automation that links strategy formulation to the different actions involved when changing the level of automation in manufacturing systems.